


Instinct to Conversion

by coolbreeze1



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Episode Tag, Gen, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-26
Updated: 2011-10-26
Packaged: 2017-10-24 23:43:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,300
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/269229
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coolbreeze1/pseuds/coolbreeze1
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Just a little scene between the episodes Instinct and Conversion.</p>
    </blockquote>





	Instinct to Conversion

**Author's Note:**

> Just a little scene between the episodes Instinct and Conversion.

It takes four shots from Ronon’s blaster and another from John’s gun before Ellia stops moving. John holds his weapon up, waiting for her to spring back to life and attack him again, but when she still doesn’t move, he finally lets his arm drop to his side.

And winces. A sharp burning pain is spreading out from his forearm and he twists it around to see the damage. Blood runs freely from a gash in the muscle and he stifles the creepy feeling that slithers over him at the sight of the feeding wound.

“You OK?”

John glances up at Ronon, then back to his arm. “Yeah,” he says, relieved to hear he sounds calm, steady. The adrenaline of the attack is starting to wear off, but it’s not apparent yet in his voice. “She tried feeding on me.”

He looks over again at Ellia’s body. The blue feeding claw is just barely visible under her body and her head is turned away, the dark hair covering her face. John shakes his head, hearing again a young teenage girl in his head but seeing a Wraith. The juxtaposition had been confusing as hell. He hadn’t wanted to kill her, hadn’t been able to separate the sound of the girl even from the mutating creature hissing at him, until she’d jumped him and he’d felt her trying to feed off of him.

He feels his hand start to shake as he tries to holster his weapon. No matter how many times he does it, pointing a weapon at another living being and pulling the trigger is never easy. Even after all these years, where shooting and surviving has become a split-second instinct, he knows he’ll replay this moment again and again. Wonder if there is something different he could have done, another way this could have played out.

“She wasn't going to let us take her back,” Ronon says.

John shoots a look at him, wondering briefly if the man’s psychic, but the former runner is staring at the ground, his eyes riveted to the still body. His face is expressionless, but John suspects there’s more depth to this man than he has so far let anyone see.

He sighs, knowing Ronon is right but knowing also his brain will still run through every _what-if_ scenario it can conjure. “Yeah, I know,” he answers, and he finally has to look down at his hand in order to holster his gun.

Ronon claps him on the shoulder and turns away, heading back toward Teyla. John has the urge to flip Ellia over, to make sure she is actually dead because it took a hell of a lot of bullets to take her down, but he fights it, lifting his arm and grimacing at the blood still flowing heavily and dripping off his elbow.

“Shit,” he hisses. He hears Ronon pause a few dozen yards away so he turns around, walking quickly. “Teyla okay?” he asks as he catches up to the man and the two head down the trail side by side.

“Yeah, she’s fine. She told me to go after you.”

John nods. He swears Ronon sounds a little bit guilty but he can’t for the life of him figure out why. If Ronon hadn’t shown up when he did, John’s pretty sure Ellia would have gotten the jump on him, and he’d have a lot more to worry about than a bleeding cut on his arm.

Speaking of which, the blood has dripped all over his hand now and he can feel the drops pooling on his fingertips. He lifts it again and grunts at the throbbing pain in the muscle of his forearm. He really should bandage it or something, but his hand is now shaking badly and he drops it, glancing at Ronon to see if he noticed.

“John! Ronon! Are you alright? What happened?”

Teyla is standing up, holding John’s coat balled up under her arm. She looks a little pale but otherwise okay, and John feels some of the tension in his gut loosen.

“We’re fine,” he answers. “Ellia’s dead.”

Teyla nods, her eyes flashing, and he’s not quite sure what to make of the expression. Is she happy Ellia’s dead? Sad? Relieved? Teyla is the most empathetic person John has ever met, and he wonders if she’d set her hopes on Beckett’s retrovirus and the chance that they could help the side of Ellia that had been a young human girl.

“You’re bleeding.” Teyla suddenly steps forward, grabbing John’s arm and flipping it around to show the feeding mark.

He can just see the two-inch gash where Ellia’s claw connected with his skin, a darker red against the brighter color of the blood. His stomach churns at the sight, and he turns his head away.

“We need to stop the bleeding,” Teyla says, her voice softer. She keeps one hand on his wrist, supporting his arm, and grabs his upper arm with her other hand, leading him to a nearby boulder.

John sits down automatically, cursing the shakiness in his hand that now seems to have spread to his legs. Adrenaline rushes always do this to him, but he’d hoped he could have at least made it back to the jumper before it became apparent to everyone else. Teyla pulls out a bandage and begins wrapping the injury, and he bites his lip at the sharp burn of cloth against the raw wound.

“How’s your head?” he asks, turning his attention back to Teyla.

“Sore but not serious,” she answers.

“You were bleeding.” And he can’t help but glance down at his own bloody arm. He almost can’t see the skin beneath the covering of red. Damn, that’s a lot of blood from one tiny gash.

“It stopped quickly,” she replies. She tugs on his arm, pulling him to his feet a second later, and it takes both her and Ronon to finally get him standing. John shakes his head, blinking back the haze that is trying to settle over him. The fight with Ellia hadn’t been that intense; the adrenaline withdrawal shouldn’t be this severe. His arm hurts, but the sharp stabbing sensation has settled into a general, all-consuming ache, making it easier to push aside.

 _“Sheppard, what’s going on?”_

McKay’s voice cracks through his radio, and John winces at the volume in his ear. He sees Teyla flinch at the same time and finds it somewhat gratifying that he’s not the only one still a little bit on edge. He raises his arm and taps his earpiece, then frowns when he sees the bandage on his arm is already soaked through with blood. “We’re heading back your way,” he finally says.

 _“What about Ellia?”_ Beckett asks.

John hears the young girl’s voice again and flashes to the blue mutation that attacked him. “Dead,” he mumbles.

 _“Anyone hurt?”_

“John has injured his arm,” Teyla pipes up before John can say anything, and he scowls at her.

 _“How badly? Should we come to you?”_

“Doc, we’ll be at your position in ten minutes,” John snaps. “Stay put.”

It takes closer to twenty minutes, but John blames that on him misjudging the distance and not because he can hardly put one foot in front of the other. When they finally spot McKay and Beckett through the trees, Ronon jogs ahead, returning moments later with the doctor at his side.

“I should have come to you,” Beckett says as he approaches, his eyes widening at the sight of John’s arm.

John grunts, too tired to say anything else, and dammit if he doesn’t feel like he’s going to puke any second. He keeps walking, brushing off the doctor’s efforts to grab his arm, and he registers McKay jumping over a log as he approaches at the same time as he notices the rushing roar of a river, and then the world around him suddenly grows fuzzy and dims.

“Colonel? Colonel, are you with me?”

John blinks, bringing the woods back into focus. The sound of the river is gone, replaced by the distant chirp of a bird. He’s on his knees, staring up into Beckett’s face, and he can sense his team hovering in a loose circle around him. “What?”

“Lost you for a second there,” Beckett mumbled, fumbling at the bandage on John’s arm.

John’s stomach flips at the sight. Blood, feeding mark, Ellia. He can feel a hand on his other side, holding him up, and he leans into it.

“John, what’s wrong?” Beckett asks, ducking down and sounding…not panicked exactly, but not calm either. Intense. Determined. Worried.

“I don’t feel so good,” John mumbles. But they’re still in the forest on an alien world. He’s still got a team he has to get home safely.

Beckett peels away the bandage that has been completely soaked through with blood, and John can still feel fresh blood welling up from the feeding mark. He knows he should be completely freaked out by the sight of all that blood, but Beckett looks worried enough for both of them, and all he really wants to do is lie down.

“Rodney, do you think you could bring the jumper closer to our location?”

“Um…yeah, okay.” He pauses, and then John hears him snap his fingers. “There should be enough room for the jumper to drop in through the gap in the trees and land in the road behind us.”

“Ronon,” John starts, his voice sounding rough.

“I’ll go with him,” he answers, and minutes later the two of them have disappeared back in the direction of the village.

“Teyla, can you head back to Zaddick’s house and grab my medical bag?”

John feels Teyla’s hands disappear from his back, cold air dancing across the dissipating warmth of her handprint on his skin. Beckett continues to mutter as he checks John over, and John lets himself slide from his knees the rest of the way to the ground, moving slowly to let Beckett know he’s doing this on purpose and not alarm the man further.

Once he is sitting down, the shakiness ebbs, and he slips slowly at his canteen of water, studying the woods around them. “What’s the situation?”

Beckett has wrapped a new bandage around his arm and is squeezing it in an attempt to get the bleeding under control. He glances up at John’s question. “The villagers are heading home,” he answers. “They say thank you, by the way, although I’m not sure they’re convinced the Wraith threat has truly been taken care of.”

“They find the Wraith body?”

“Some of them went to retrieve it. I believe they’re planning on burning it like the other ones. They’ve lived in fear for so many years that I think it will take some time for them to settle down again, remember what their lives used to be like.”

John grunts, nodding. Beckett is still pressing the palm of his hand into his arm, making it hard for him to ignore the growing ache. At least the blood seems to have stopped flowing. “We should get Ellia,” he mumbles.

“Bury her?”

“Or something,” John says, sighing. In truth, he has no idea what to do with Ellia, but he’s not sure just leaving her in the forest is a good idea.

“The villagers can handle that.”

John has no reply to that and they lapse into silence. Within minutes, Teyla returns with one of Beckett’s bags and the jumper lands in the road a few hundred yards behind them, the hum of the engines a dead giveaway. John climbs to his feet on his own, and smiles when the world doesn’t sway or stutter around him. The few minutes of sitting down has worked miracles. The three of them make their way to the jumper, and John doesn’t stumble once. He shoots Ronon and McKay a grin as walks up the back ramp of the jumper and heads immediately for the pilot’s seat.

Beckett grabs his arm and steers him toward one of the back benches. “Let Rodney fly us home. I want to get an IV started.”

“Ah, doc—” John starts, but he’s already sitting on the bench and Beckett is setting out the necessary equipment next to him.

“Don’t you _ah, doc_ me. I saw how much your arm was bleeding. Sit back and relax. We’ll be in Atlantis in no time.”

John sighs, knowing he can’t fight off Beckett when he’s in full doctor mode. The jumper lifts off the ground, flying smoothly through the atmosphere, and Beckett has the IV started almost before John feels the pinprick in his arm. Teyla is sitting next to him, rubbing at the back of her head and she finally manages to draw Beckett’s attention away from himself. The pain in John’s arm has dropped to a dull, distant throb, and he wonders if the doctor slipped something into the IV when he wasn’t looking.

 _Who cares?_ He relaxes even more when he feels the jumper slide through the gate. Beckett calls for a medical team to meet them in the jumper bay, and he’s tempted to countermand the order, but McKay interrupts him with a yelp of pain and something about a _gigantic_ splinter.

The mess with Ellia is over, and the shakiness he’d felt earlier gone. He climbs onto the gurney and relaxes, letting the medical team hover and offering a token though somewhat apathetic protest as they make their way through the halls that the whole gurney ride thing is unnecessary. He’s fine—he can feel it. One more successful mission under their belt. In another hour, he’ll be sitting in the mess hall, eating lunch, relaxing with his team, and looking forward to the next trip through the gate.

 _(And Conversion starts...)_


End file.
